If you were in the middle of watching the Defenders of Hell’s Kitchen and New York City when Netflix took them away, don’t worry. You won’t have to wait too long to continue the journeys of Matt Murdock, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Danny Rand, and Frank Castle.
News broke in February 2022 that the Netflix Marvel shows would be leaving the platform at the end of the month, and as someone who was slowly working my way through the series (watching some for the first time and revisiting some old faves), I took it as a moment to dive head first into the Netflix MCU I hadn’t watch to finish it before the shows left Netflix. Well, I basically did it for nothing, since we already have a release date for the Netflix MCU on Disney+.
When do the Defenders land on Disney+?
Starting on March 16, 2022, you can watch the entire Netflix run on Disney+. Including Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Punisher, and The Defenders, the shows will have a viewer discretion label but will remain the series that existed while on Netflix, despite the transition to a more family-themed platform. Disney released a trailer leading up to the news that has looks into each show as well as the news that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D will also hit Disney+ on the same day.
It makes sense that the Netflix shows and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D are going to Disney+, but it’s how quickly the series are showing up there that’s surprising.
The future of the Defenders
The way that each of these series ended left us with really cool next season ideas, only for them to end before they had the chance to explore it. But now that Matt Murdock has shown up in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Wilson Fisk terrorized Hell’s Kitchen in Hawkeye, the question is simply “Where are they heading next?”
I think that Disney bringing the shows to the platform so quickly is a clear sign that they’re going to use these characters more in the future, and I, personally, would love if they talked about bringing the shows back on Disney+. It’d be relatively easy to keep them going, especially since they exist (for the most part) completely outside of the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. And even with Fisk meeting Kate Bishop and being connected to Echo, or Matt Murdock knowing Spider-Man, that doesn’t mean that they have to be solely connected to other characters.
What worked so well about these shows is that, for the most part, they were independent of each other. There were crossover characters and references to one another, but they had their own arcs that didn’t include major characters from one of the other shows and should be easy enough to bring back on Disney+.
I don’t know that it will happen, but if they’re going to keep bringing characters back (like the rumored Jessica Jones cameo in She/Hulk), then maybe they’ll just have these series on Disney+ for fans to go back to to learn about them when they do show up. I hope it means we’ll see the entire team at some point or another but at least we know now where the Netflix MCU is going to live.
(image: Marvel Entertainment)
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Published: Mar 1, 2022 12:38 pm